simen

I'd say it's more similar to Javascript. In fact all of the examples are valid JS if you replace `fn` with `function`. (Although JS doesn't have implicit returns.)

At a guess, the author chose the syntax because it's familiar and easy to parse. Go's syntax is... eccentric where it differs from typical C-style languages.

I mean, it's clearly a very abstract representation based on archaeological data. There's no people or animals in the streets, which wouldn't have been the case even at night let alone midday, and all the houses except the famous landmarks are basic geometric boxes. It's not intended to be a video-game like living city, but rather a semi-immersive virtual museum.

What you're asking for would have required an entirely different budget and likely would run counter to the point of the model. It's not a simulation.

They're comparing to an in-order CPU. Given that most CPUs are out-of-order (at least of the non-embedded variety, and GC is less used in such applications anyway), it would be better and more intellectually honest to actually compare to a typical CPU that performs GC. They kind of address this in the paper but only in a short aside: "Note that previous research [1] showed that out-of-order CPUs, while moderately faster, are not the best trade-off point for GC (a result we confirmed in preliminary simulations)." So they don't quantify what any of this means.

I think it's an interesting idea, but it doesn't bode well when they seemingly choose the wrong target for comparison and hand-wave away the difference as insignificant.

I'm pretty sure that is the first implementation of Lisp. Earlier "versions" of Lisp were hand-compiled, because it was considered too difficult to produce a compiler. Then Steve Russell realized that McCarthy's "eval" function could be implemented in assembly language (which apparently hadn't occurred to McCarthy, he considered it merely theoretical) and produced the first Lisp interpreter. Note that the manual is from March 1960 and McCarthy's first paper on Lisp was published in April 1960, so nobody outside his circle at MIT would have known about Lisp at the time.

The manual also states that it's for "a version of Lisp being prepared for the IBM 709", implying the manual was written while the interpreter was still being developed, and all references I've found state that the IBM 709 version was the first practical implementation.

More on the very early history of Lisp here: http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf

What Labour actually decided against was not oil exploration, but rather a konsekvensutredning, or an investigation into the possible environmental and social effects of oil extraction in the area. Which is in many ways a more radical position, as they are not even interesting in finding out what possible damage oil production might cause. They're rejecting the preliminary step before oil exploration, which is in turn the preliminary step to actual oil extraction.

Of course the current government never had any plans to conduct any preliminary steps. The two major parties (the Conservatives and the Progress Party) are all for it, but the minor supporting parties (the Liberals and Christian Democrats) are not, and so far they've gotten their will.

Dude, he wrote a detailed postmortem of his own mistakes. That is taking responsibility. You're projecting, for whatever reason. The sentence about the quiet man is clearly referencing the original hero of his story, who might not have saved 10 people but did try to save another man's life while risking his own.

Praggnanandhaa is actually the fourth youngest GM of all time and the third youngest right now, but still, it's impressive. There's no guarantees that this kid will progress at the same rate, but don't let that take away from the feel-good aspect of the story.

Fischer won the US championship for adults at the age of 14. He then went on to become the youngest candidate for the world championship in history at the age of 15 - a distinction he still holds.

The serious statement he makes is that humans have complex motivations, and he thinks any superintelligence would as well--in fact it might be a defining feature of intelligence. The Rick and Morty reference was just a humorous example of what might happen, not an actual argument. The subheading was "the argument from complex motivations", not "the argument from Rick and Morty", so let's try and focus on the serious part and not the humorous aside.

The title makes no sense if you interpret it that way, also, it seems to be a very niche term (most of the top google results are not computer related at all). I think 99% of people who saw the headline understood it the correct way.

Maybe switch banks? My experience is I've had my account blocked exactly once - and that turned out to be actual identity theft. In the end, I didn't permanently lose any money thanks to the system working as intended. On one other occasion, I received a phone call from my bank inquiring about an unusual charge. I confirmed that this time it was a legitimate transaction I made and neither the account nor transaction were blocked.

Are you for real? It's hardly a bold claim that education helps spread and retain knowledge. This is well known and supported by numerous studies. We know that parents' economic and educational status correlates well with children's economic and educational status. Also, this area was more or less completely converted to Christianity. If everyone's Christian, that can hardly account for the fact that economic and educational status correlates with distance to these missions. The article also mentions that this same relationship did not hold for the Fransiscan missions, who similarly promoted Catholicism and belief in the Bible, but didn't focus as much on education. This is unexpected if Christianity by itself was the primary cause.

Also, I'm not an expert on the Guarani or Jesuit missions, but it seems that actually the natives were the ones who dictated how labor was to be organized: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614138 This says that they established a sort of proto-socialist system (my word, not theirs) of communal ownership and redistribution of food on mission lands by threatening to go on strike, essentially. Since the Jesuits were totally dependent on the Guarani as the primary labor force farming and feeding the missions, they couldn't impose the harsher labor regime they wanted. This doesn't sound like unenlightened Indians being taught the value of hard work by Jesus, it sounds like a well-organized group of people who knew the value of their own labor and took steps to ensure that they could benefit fairly from it.

All in all, if you want to claim that the power of Christian belief alone can account for these findings, I think the burden of proof is squarely on your shoulders.

This is called the black hole information paradox. Today most physicists believe that hawking radiation preserves quantum information. Hawking himself made a bet that it doesn’t, but by 2004 he had become convinced and conceded the bet. But as far as I know this is still an open question - we’ve never detected hawking radiation experimentally.

I did say passing familiarity, which is not a very high bar to clear. It's been my experience, and I don't travel much in rarefied intellectual circles.

I don't know, but if the standard of comparison is Napoleon he doesn't need to be particularly good. There's even a bad opening named after him because he was known to be a mediocre player.

Sounds like typical anti-politician bullshit. Most adults have at least a passing familiarity with the rules of chess, I don't see any reason why world leaders would be any different. Bill Clinton was on his university's chess team. Obama is said to play chess, although he never played competitively. I suppose you don't count them as Western, but the Russians, of course, take chess extremely seriously. So seriously, in fact, that the new president of FIDE, Arkady Dvorkovich, was deputy prime minister of Russia until May of this year.

> "Increase GABA" - I thought oral GABA supplements do not cross the blood-brain barrier?

Oral GABA doesn't cross the BBB in appreciable concentrations, but I assume they mean increase GABA neurotransmission, which can be done with any number of ligands that do cross into the brain. Probably not benzos, since long-term usage increases the risk of Alzheimer's (and cognitive impairment is an effect even in healthy individuals). But perhaps something like baclofen (chloro-phenyl-GABA) which was tested in a rat model here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29133125

I don't think Nim has one in the standard library, but people have built variations on it. Here's a couple:

* https://github.com/bluenote10/nim-stringinterpolation/blob/m... This one does string interpolation and a printf-like syntax with compile time type checking. It does call out to C but only after it's already parsed and validated and transformed the format string.

* https://github.com/kaushalmodi/strfmt/blob/master/strfmt.nim This one implements a more complex string formatting syntax with lots of convenience functions. It's more complex but provides a lot more functionality than the previous one without relying on FFI.

I'm not a Nim programmer but I imagine those two demonstrate how Nim metaprogramming works even if neither exactly duplicates the behavior of printf.

It doesn't translate to wasm text format, but to wasm binary format. The walt-compiler (https://github.com/ballercat/walt/tree/master/packages/walt-...) readme shows how to use it to compile text into a a buffer which you can write to disk or instantiate into a webassembly module.

As far as I'm aware therapy and antidepressants are equally effective, in the studies that have actually compared them such as this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3683266/ However that is only true in aggregate and obviously not necessarily true of any given individual.

I'm really reluctant to get into any further discussion though because it seems like you're arguing against things I never said, and bringing up irrelevant, but extremely invasive and side-effect prone procedures like hemispherectomy as if that proves that data about antidepressants is bunk, which is just a complete non sequitur. It would be like bringing up bloodletting or lobotomy as if that proves that the data about modern vaccines NOT causing autism is bunk. Just a complete logical disconnect.

I sympathize with you, I really do. I've had some similar experiences. But you're overstating the case. Numerous meta-analyses have found that antidepressants do work for people with severe depression, much better than placebo. Unfortunately there's many people for whom they don't work, and even when they work you may have to try many different kinds to find the right one(s). The state of depression treatment is sadly not very good right now, everyone knows this. But it's just not true that there's not "a single shred of proof that these medicines work".

Depression treatment doesn't depend on "chemical imbalance" as an explanation either. Research on whether antidepressants work proceeds alongside research on why they work, if they do--usually studies on the efficacy of drugs are completely independent of mechanism. They study clinical outcomes, not neurochemical or larger structural brain issues.

So even if we had no idea why antidepressants (potentially) work, we could still know that they do work based on clinical outcomes. And it's not exactly true that we have no clue at all. The past 20 or so years the monoamine hypothesis hasn't been the main avenue of research into the neurobiology of depression. These days, it's at best considered one possible factor, not the defining and only factor. There's a lot of research into the structural changes that follow depression and recovery. For instance it's now known that serotonin helps regulate the expression of BDNF, which in turn regulates the growth and repair of brain cells and synapses. So it may well be that serotonin triggers large-scale "repairs" in the brain in areas related to emotional processing, such as the amygdala. Here you can see that the focus isn't so much on individual levels of "chemicals" in the brain as on the structure of the brain and how different natural and exogenous factors affect that.

You could be standing on top of an archeological site and never know it. Many of the features discovered by lidar are very very hard to spot from the ground. The kinds of people who have the expertise to spot them tend not to be tomb raiders.

You're going to use a mythological figure to prove that cannabis makes you think more clearly? I think you've smoked a bit much there, buddy.

If we look at the scientific research, certain studies have claimed that aspects of creativity could be enhanced with cannabis (often based on self-reports rather than objective measurements), but those results are inconclusive at best. Cognitive impairments due to both acute and chronic cannabis use are much more well-documented. Here is a review of executive function deficits due to cannabis use:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037578/

Here is a study that found low-potency cannabis had no effect on creativity, while high-potency cannabis impaired divergent thinking: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-014-3749-1

If you want to argue that cannabis should be legal, I have no issue with that. But the way to go isn't to say "it's a cognitive enhancer", which it is not to the best of our scientific understanding.

They still haven’t built the Analytical Engine, which was the general-purpose computer and significantly more complex.

Also, building something with the benefit of 150 years of technological progress gives you quite a leg up on the past even if you use techniques that would have technically been available back then.

It's a terrible name. Many of these projects have nothing to do with the web (the three concrete examples cited were two filesharing protocols and one cryptocurrency, none of which are about serving websites). And it's awkward to say.

> For me using an exception to indicate the lack of a value corresponding to a key in a map (is it really exceptional for this to happen?)

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Most languages allow you to choose whether you want a hash to throw a key error on non-existing keys or return a signal value. My favorite is the uber-flexible approach and nice syntax in Crystal:

  hash[foo] is sugar for hash.fetch(foo)

  hash[foo]? is sugar for hash.fetch(foo, nil)

  hash.fetch(foo) will return the default value of the hash table on nonexistent keys if one was assigned, otherwise raise keyerror

  hash.fetch(foo, nil) will return nil on nonexistent keys

Ruby uses the same convention. (excluding macros, and adding question_mark_predicates?) I've seen C++ projects that adopt the same style. I don't see what's so objectionable about it.

Naturally for a language based off Ruby, the original compiler was written in Ruby. It became self-hosting in late 2013: https://crystal-lang.org/2013/11/14/good-bye-ruby-thursday.h...

You could begin with 500 lines or less: http://www.aosabook.org/en/500L/a-python-interpreter-written...

It implements a naive, simplified Python VM in Python. Of course, that is only a very high-level overview. By necessity it handwaves a ton by just relying on the underlying Python (like GC). For a more in-depth look, you can check out PyPy's dev docs (http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/). PyPy is an alternative to CPython, so it does many things very differently (some in a way that have never been done in prog lang implementation before), but the docs do make comparisons to CPython.

It all depends on how safe the OS software sandbox is. Which is something that recent HW vulnerabilities really has emphasized even if you're not running in ring0. And it's not like this is a new idea: as mentioned, Microsoft already built a research OS on this idea.

Personally, I say more power to this high schooler. It's just a research project, and it'll be interesting to see where it goes. Nobody is suggesting you replace Linux/OSX/Windows with this thing anytime soon.